Hacker News: degrees57

New comment by degrees57 in "Copilot edited an ad into my PR"

degrees57 — Mon, 30 Mar 2026 19:48:47 +0000

You have to get acquired by Microsoft first.

New comment by degrees57 in "A list of fun destinations for telnet"

degrees57 — Tue, 27 Jan 2026 17:53:04 +0000

Thank you! This was fun.

New comment by degrees57 in "Ask HN: Share your personal website"

degrees57 — Wed, 14 Jan 2026 20:41:42 +0000

I had to learn WordPress to help a local org, so I went ahead and did my own blog for fun: https://www.gerisch.org/

New comment by degrees57 in "Text case changes the size of QR codes"

degrees57 — Fri, 07 Nov 2025 14:56:19 +0000

Same. I am thankful that this sort of article shows up here.

New comment by degrees57 in "Copilot broke audit logs, but Microsoft won't tell customers"

degrees57 — Wed, 20 Aug 2025 18:28:48 +0000

I'd rather be a big fish in a small pond than a minnow in Microsoft's ocean.

New comment by degrees57 in "Is an Intel N100 or N150 a better value than a Raspberry Pi?"

degrees57 — Fri, 04 Jul 2025 15:58:23 +0000

My brother went looking for an N100 with the quietest fan, and gave it to me for Christmas two years ago. It has been an excellent little desktop with no discernable noise that I can tell. Morefine M8S, fwiw.

New comment by degrees57 in "A Brief, Incomplete, and Mostly Wrong History of Robotics"

degrees57 — Fri, 20 Jun 2025 17:54:22 +0000

I was hoping to see a mention of Odex 1 by Odetics. I was working in a printed circuit board factory at the time (1983), and we got to build boards for it. Later on, there was a demo where it lifted one end of a small pickup truck off the ground.

New comment by degrees57 in "Ask HN: What projects do you donate to?"

degrees57 — Tue, 27 May 2025 18:44:10 +0000

I donate to FutureMe.org because I like the service, and want to see it continue. I used to be able to schedule a monthly donation through Paypal (I think), but something happened, and now I have to remember to send a donation out every year.

My other donations go out monthly to Internet Archive, EFF, and Thunderbird.

There for a while, The TOR Project had a thing where I could contribute by running (paying for) a node on a hosting provider (I think it might have been AWS?). That effort died on the vine and was shut down.

For content creators, I donate to Phoronix.

New comment by degrees57 in "A Reddit bot drove me insane"

degrees57 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 05:47:45 +0000

Yes, and in my opinion, this was what killed Slashdot.

New comment by degrees57 in "A Reddit bot drove me insane"

degrees57 — Mon, 14 Apr 2025 05:46:43 +0000

I agree with you, and think that if Slashdot were to do a rebirth, it might succeed. Of course, they'd have to figure out what went wrong and put in mechanisms to prevent that.

But the five vote options (insightful, interesting, funny, off-topic, troll) were _useful_. Having a feed based on the score of votes plus friend bonus, friend-of-a-friend bonus, foe penalty, friend-of-a-foe penalty gave me a super news feed I stuck with for almost a decade.

I could see a more complex voting rule set being helpful. But basically, it was really good until it wasn't, and that was a problem of the people behind the scenes there, and not the system itself.

New comment by degrees57 in "Ask HN: Do you still use search engines?"

degrees57 — Tue, 08 Apr 2025 19:34:07 +0000

I switched my default search engine in my browser to perplexity.ai a few months ago and am super happy with it. The only time I use Google anymore is to specifically visit www.google.com and put site:example.com in the search field, when I know the results I am looking for are only found within that site. I've only had to do that five or six times in the last few months.

And yes, just plain old Google search is completely lackluster in comparison to the perplexity.ai search I get to do today.

New comment by degrees57 in "Writing Programs with Ncurses"

degrees57 — Wed, 26 Mar 2025 19:44:19 +0000

I always liked that on SuSE, I had my choice with YaST of either the Ncurses interface or the GUI X Window System. The functionality was identical, but sometimes a GUI is pleasant.

New comment by degrees57 in "Ask HN: What less-popular systems programming language are you using?"

degrees57 — Tue, 04 Mar 2025 19:15:56 +0000

Dude, you're taking the easy way out. Please go purist and pull the wiring boards out of the closet.

New comment by degrees57 in "Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives"

degrees57 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:39:40 +0000

Thank you; I didn't know that Brave has a peer-to-peer sync.

New comment by degrees57 in "Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives"

degrees57 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 19:37:55 +0000

Thank you. I was unaware of this.

New comment by degrees57 in "Trust in Firefox and Mozilla Is Gone – Let's Talk Alternatives"

degrees57 — Sun, 02 Mar 2025 15:51:34 +0000

I'd like to ask if there is a bookmark sync function and plugin sync function in any of these alternatives.

It does seem to me that Mozilla corporation management has become corrupted, and will only get worse; so I'd like to move off Mozilla Firefox and onto something else.

But I really like that when I wipe a machine and install a new OS, first I install the Bitwarden plugin, then that lets me log in to the Mozilla account, and then that syncs down all my plugins and bookmarks into Firefox. I really like my Temporary Containers plugin in Firefox, for example, in addition to uBlock Origin. But all of them, really: the GNU Terry Pratchet plugin is fun.

The Mozilla Firefox solution does also work both on Linux and Windows.

If there is some other form of sync for plugins and bookmarks, then I'd leap at Librewolf or Waterfox or Icecat. But I am unaware of a sync solution that would work.

Anyone have something they like? I can self-host if that is an option.

New comment by degrees57 in "Matt Mullenweg Asks What Drama to Create in 2025, Community Reacts"

degrees57 — Fri, 27 Dec 2024 20:19:12 +0000

Okay, that actually made me laugh. Thanks.

New comment by degrees57 in "Scientific American's departing editor and the politicization of science"

degrees57 — Tue, 19 Nov 2024 14:53:38 +0000

My mom had subscribed to Scientific American for more than twenty years (maybe 30), but for this very reason stopped her subscription a few years ago. It had turned from informing its readers about science to political posturing. She was sad that she's lost a previously intellectually valuable resource.

I suspect we'll eventually get something like a Substack for Science author (editor) on a subscription model that will do long form pieces and invite SMEs to talk about their stuff.

New comment by degrees57 in "The Copenhagen Book: general guideline on implementing auth in web applications"

degrees57 — Fri, 11 Oct 2024 18:26:20 +0000

I'm not a fan of email + magic link. I know of two security gateways which "click" on the link to check to see if it ends up going to a known malicious website. So then the end user calls in a trouble ticket, because the login authorization page says their magic link is already expired (before they even got it).

So for me, email + email OTP is the way to go.

New comment by degrees57 in "Ask HN: Has anyone here learned COBOL for fun?"

degrees57 — Tue, 12 Sep 2023 13:33:18 +0000

I learned COBOL in college just to learn it, and I loved the verbosity of it. Verbosity was kind of the point: if you name your variables properly, you have self-documenting code.

Yes, the processing COBOL does is restricting, but then my first full-time programming job was two and a half years writing RPG II code. COBOL would have been an upgrade.